Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei is a living metaphor for all that is wrong with post-Western society. He now proclaims that Israel — democratic and constitutional — is the “number one threat” to the Middle East. That he made this comment from Tehran — after his hosts have serially promised to wipe Israel off the map, and after his own agency missed an entire weapons facility run by an autocratic theocracy — says it all.

ElBaradei, who was educated in the West, and much of whose family lives in the safety and prosperity of the West, has made a career of appeasing Iran, lecturing Westerners about their assorted sins, and saying nothing about the dictatorship in Egypt (for which he once worked). Indeed, beyond Egypt, he has said nothing about the Middle East’s self-induced pathologies — from tribalism, gender apartheid, and statism to dictatorship and religious intolerance — which are a far more significant cause of the region’s economic stagnation than is Western colonialism.

That ElBaradei has been showered with awards from Western governments and universities — among them the Nobel Prize — reveals how well he understands the West’s timidity and lack of principle. He knows that he and his family are safer and freer outside Egypt than they are inside Egypt, and he knows that Israel is not going to nuke its neighbors or announce that it would like to wipe Syria or Egypt off the map. He also knows that elites in the West like to be chided by Westernized non-Westernizers about their assorted sins — it allows those Western elites to alleviate their guilt at very little cost.

In short, if ElBaradei didn’t exist, he would have to be invented.